Fateless

The Holocaust has proven to be a morbidly fascinating subject matter for filmmakers, with its themes of horror, guilt and hate providing a decidedly plentiful gamut from which to draw inspiration.

Enter Hungarian cinematographer turned director Lajos Koltai, whose mesmeric film Fateless, originally premiered at the Berlin film festival two years ago. He presents us with a very different perspective on one of history’s most significant atrocities. Fellow Hungarian Imre Kertesz, who adapted the screenplay from his own semi-autobiographical book, writes the film’s script, chronicling the plight of Gyuri (played by Marcell Nagy), a 14-year-old Budapest Jew in 1944. Gyuri hails from a middle-class family preparing themselves for the departure of the father, who has been summoned to a labour camp by the Nazis. With Gyuri’s mother having walked out on the family already, the boy is to be left with his stepmother. A final, profoundly gloomy, day is spent with the family’s myriad of relations, as they spend what could be the last time with the fated man.

Gyuri leaves school and starts working to help support his family, and it is while on his way to work that he is randomly taken off a bus for an ID check, and ends up at Auschwitz. The horror is icily transmitted as Gyuri looks out the tiny slitted window of the camp-bound train, and attempts to make out the name of the concentration camp we are now all too familiar with..

Koltai uses the largest budget ever given to a Hungarian production to great effect, washing the early scenes in Budapest with vibrant colour and sucking all vibrancy out of the frame as we enter the camp with the teenager. Nagy as Gyuri is initially an extremely suspect actor, but as the film develops, a shocking physical transformation and an increasingly haunted demeanour dispels his performance’s initial woodenness.

Gyuri learns to survive. He pretends his dead bedmate is still alive in order to get his rations. He works lugging huge bags of concrete all day, shoveling vast piles of rubble, standing in a yard line-up from dawn till dusk, all the time listening to the confused babblings of various fellow inmates about home, innocence and soup.

When Gyuri is eventually transferred to a Nazi medical facility, due to his wounded and festering knee, he is treated with a suspicious amount of goodwill by an SS officer, and one suspects he is being prepared for some form of experimentation. Before this is realised, the camp is freed by American troops, one of whom (played by Daniel Craig) offers Gyuri the chance to return to America with him and pursue a college education. Gyuri refuses, his loyalties still lying with Hungary, and he begins his journey home.
 
It is here that the film takes its most radical step, as the boy returns to a home that no longer exists and to feelings of utter ambivalence about his ‘survival’. The shock of seeing a child returning from a concentration camp, travelling on a local tram while still wearing his filthy camp shirt, is a surreal, and certainly original, image. He is not feted as any kind of hero and he happens upon a few of his family’s friends with no great enthusiasm or joy at the reunion. Instead he is dazed and impassive, muttering to one inquiry about the camps that ‘hell does not exist, but the camps do’.

Gyuri questions himself and his experience of the camps. He wonders if he is now allowed to live a life, to experience happiness, to just exist without the cloud of the camp, the Holocaust and the Jewish war experience, weighing on him forever. The film observes some of the companionship and friendship he experiences in the camps, and it is certainly not as black and white, in both the literal and metaphorical senses, as Schindler’s List. His bewilderment, and his countrymen’s lack of outrage, leaves Gyuri with a perplexed and existential questioning of his role in both history and his own future. The film is a dark, brave, thoughtful effort that poses questions one would not normally associate with the Holocaust experience.